In late 2013, Google began to cache all images in email sent to Gmail users, storing remotely-hosted images on their own servers instead of accessing them each time an email is opened. Laura at Word to the Wise wrote up some good info at the time, focusing mainly on the parts of email tracking that were (or were not) affected by the changes.

Fast forward to 2018, and it looks like Yahoo has adopted a similar policy of image caching. According to Litmus, Yahoo recently began caching images on their servers in the same manner as Google. And like Google’s version, this one won’t break open tracking – but could cause some unusual data points or issues with geolocation or user agent tracking. If you track the location of email opens, you’re likely to start seeing a lot more traffic from Sunnyvale, CA (the location of Yahoo’s servers), and any dynamically-generated content based on the location of the recipient will reflect that. In fairness, IP geolocation has never been a precise science, so most marketers should rely on other signals along with that data to serve up location-specific content.

When Google introduced this feature, they used it as a platform to allow images to load by default for all mail sent to the Inbox. There has been no announcement or indication thus far, but is it possible Yahoo is planning a similar feature? As with most of the changes taking place under the new Oath umbrella; we’ll just have to wait and see.

In late February Return Path released the 2017 installment of their annual Deliverability Benchmark Report, which tallies inbox and spam folder rates by country and industry. Each year the data is generated by monitoring more than 2 billion consumer emails to identify trends and averages for each region and industry segment.

The data, compiled between June 2016 and June 2017, shows little change overall from last year’s report. On average, around 20% of mail worldwide never reaches the inbox, with the majority of that – 70% – rejected at the server gateway (bounced). As in years past, the US falls short of that average: just 77% of mail made it to the the inbox. The good news for US senders is that this represents an increase of around 4% from ’15-16 numbers.

Around the world, Canada and Australia tied for the highest inbox rates, with 90% of mail in those countries reaching the inbox. The merits of Canada’s Anti-Spam Law may be disputed, but it certainly seems to have had a positive impact on inbox placement there. Prior to the law taking effect in 2014, inbox rates in Canada dipped as low as 79% – but they have hovered around 90% since then. CASL certainly isn’t guaranteed to be the cause, but it’s a good bet there’s some correlation there.

Results by industry

The breakdown of inbox rates by industry uncovered a couple of interesting trends. Among the 16 industries tracked, none averaged below 76% inbox rate on the year. The Automotive industry, previously in last place with 66%, now edges out the Nonprofit/Education/Government sector by a point at 77%. Meanwhile the Insurance industry, perennially at the low end of the spectrum, saw a 13-point jump to 89%. Apparel, Electronics, and Home Improvement all saw decreases but remained at 85% or above, while Finance took the top spot with 94% of their mail reaching the inbox.

A few weeks ago we told you about AOL’s migration of their MX servers to Yahoo’s infrastructure as part of the merger of the two entities under Verizon’s new Oath brand. Since that change in early February, mail to AOL recipients has been handled by Yahoo’s servers. No specifics have been released on how the combined mail system will handle filtering, but observations of recent bounces may shed some light on that.

Over the past 2-3 weeks a number of senders have been seeing the dreaded “Yahoo deferrals” from recipients with AOL email addresses. These deferrals – temporary bounces usually caused by a high complaint rate – occur frequently for many high-volume senders mailing Yahoo recipients. These bounces are typically returned in a format similar to the following:

The appearance of these types of bounces when sending to AOL recipients means you now have to contend not only with AOL’s spam filtering but with that of Yahoo. While AOL is known for its useful resources and responsive Postmaster team, the Yahoo Mail team can be more difficult to reach when issues arise. If you do run into any of these bounces, it’s probably a good idea to reach out to Yahoo via their Support form since the filtering is occurring on their mail servers.

Last week I wrote about the changes taking place at major email providers, specifically the convergence of AOL and Yahoo’s mail servers. Today on their Postmaster blog, AOL issued confirmation of these changes. The statement indicates the “majority of AOL’s MX records” will be routed to the new combined mail servers with little if any visible impact to senders.

The message also assured senders that established feedback loops (FBLs) should continue to function without interruption. While AOL notes that issues are unlikely, if you see any abnormalities postmaster@aol.com remains the best way to reach out for assistance.

New year, new you…that’s what they always say, right? Just a few weeks into 2018, it seems like some of the big 4 ISPs (soon to be Big 3?) are really taking that concept to heart.

Microsoft’s major migration of Outlook.com to the Office365 backend was technically completed in 2017, but based on feedback from senders in industry groups delivery issues still abound. The indications from MS are that the mail handling and filtering infrastructure are a work in progress, but no formal statement has been issued to that end. Some senders have stated MS support is unable to provide remediation for many of these issues, even though there may be backend adjustments taking place. If you’re having trouble getting mail to Microsoft, just know you’re not alone and that someone over there is paying attention.

Verizon ended its own webmail service last year, and consolidated its AOL and Yahoo brands under the Oath moniker. AOL and Yahoo’s email services have remained separate thus far, but indications are that will change in the next few days. It’s been reported that the merger of these mail platforms starts in earnest on or around February 1st. As of that date, mail to AOL will be routed and handled by the Yahoo mail servers. To me this sounds a bit like the SBCGlobal arrangement between AT&T/BellSouth and Yahoo, wherein one provided the mail interface while the other handled the mail routing and filtering. At this time, no formal announcement has been made, so we’ll have to sit tight to find out exactly what this means for sending to AOL recipients.

Last month Al Iverson at Spam Resource, along with Engadget and XDA developers, reported on a new feature of Google’s Inbox that prompts recipients to unsubscribe from mailings they don’t open. The card, which appears at the top of the interface, calls out mailings categorized as Promotions that the user hasn’t opened in the past 30 days and provides the option to unsubscribe or not, all with a single click.

Introduced in 2014, Inbox is Google’s next-gen email client. The app takes Gmail’s concept of the Tabbed Inbox to the next level, bundling messages by type and showing cards based on data found in emails – receipts for purchases, travel arrangements, and event tickets, for example. At the time of Al’s post the feature was live on the web and Android versions of Inbox, but I can confirm it has now arrived in the iOS version as well.

According to Litmus, Gmail accounts for roughly 26% of all email opens – second only to Apple’s iOS mail client. This doesn’t indicate what percentage of those openers use Inbox as opposed to traditional Gmail, but Google has previously indicated that Inbox has a significant number of users and in 2016 noted that 10% of all email replies on mobile came from the Smart Reply feature found within Inbox.

Google continues to innovate in finding ways to prioritize mail its users want and get rid of mail they don’t. Does your email strategy reflect that? If your sending patterns and list management foster engagement and interaction, you’re likely to see less of an impact from a change like this. Alternatively, if you’re still holding on to the “batch and blast” mindset, you may not be so lucky.

Earlier this month I spent a week in sunny Toronto for the Fall M³AAWG meeting, featuring a variety of sessions and conversations around all things anti-abuse. At any industry event like this, spam traps are usually a popular topic of discussion (check out this post for a primer on spam traps and why they matter). Senders want to know how to avoid or get rid of them, while many blacklist operators consider them a necessary evil to help identify poor sending practices. One of the most hotly-debated questions regarding spam traps surrounds how to remove them from your list. Many senders and solution vendors claim to be able to identify and remove spam traps, while trap operators go to great lengths to keep their traps anonymous. Let’s look at a couple of the most commonly-cited ways of identifying spam traps and how effective they really are.

List Validation & Hygiene Vendors

As mailbox providers have made it harder to reach the inbox, list hygiene services have become a booming segment of the industry. While some employ dubious methods, even prompting a warning from Spamhaus, there are a number of services that are considered reputable and are commonly used by legitimate marketers and even ESPs. For our discussion, let’s focus on these more reputable vendors.

As a basic rule, list validation services will take your file of contacts and provide a grade or score for each record. The data will indicate whether the email address is confirmed valid, confirmed invalid, or somewhere in between. Most of these vendors claim (some more prominently than others) to be able to identify spam trap addresses. Therefore, if you believe or know you have traps in your list, you should be able to purchase these services and solve your problem, right?

Not so fast, hot shot. Spam traps are secret by nature – if you know an address is a spam trap, then it has lost its effectiveness. As a result, trap operators make efforts to ensure traps are not identified by any outside party, including validation services. The traps identified by these services may have been actively used in the past, but at this point have likely been abandoned by their operator. Even those traps that are still in use would represent only a fraction of the spam traps that exist in the wild. So you may clean a few traps off your list, but you’re not going to solve any major spam trap issues using one of these services.

Effectiveness grade: F

Segmentation and isolation

Over the years I’ve run across many senders (and even some vendors) who believe that identifying spam traps in your list is as simple as pinpointing the time of the trap hits and/or the affected message(s) and/or the group that contains the traps. These senders will often slice up affected lists, sending to smaller and smaller segments of contacts until they have isolated a very small number of records that are, or may be, traps. They can then remove these bad apples from the list and go on sending willy-nilly to the rest of the recipients.

In reality, there are a couple of problems with this approach. First, most trap operators or blacklist admins aren’t going to provide you with the type of data that is required for this process. If you are considered a relatively trustworthy sender, you mightget very limited data about trap hits – a date or a subject line, perhaps – but this is almost always just a sample of the full data set. If you get details on a single trap hit, there are likely 10 or 20 or 100 more hits that you can’t see. Trying to narrow down your list based on incomplete data is not likely to generate accurate results.

Effectiveness grade: D

Nullification

Similar to the previous method, this process involves using data provided by the trap operator to isolate and remove affected recipients. This is most often implemented by senders who use highly targeted segments and who may be sending to only a few dozen or hundred recipients at a time. Because of the small segment size, the sender often finds it more appealing to simply remove the entire list that was targeted on the specific day or with the specific message identified as hitting traps.

While removing the entire recipient list could be a slightly more effective solution, this method suffers from the same deficiency as the last: lack of data. This method is only effective if the trap operator provides the full list of trap hits with timestamps – which is extremely unlikely. So even if you suppress the list of recipients called out for one hit, you are likely to be missing the lists that contain additional traps. .

Effectiveness grade: C-

As you can see, none of these methods are especially effective at resolving spam trap issues, and it’s for a simple reason: they address the symptoms (spam traps) instead of the underlying problem (poor list acquisition or hygiene practices). Many trap operators will recommend reconfirming your contact database, the only truly effective method to remove spam traps from your database. However, you’re likely to lose some valid recipients in the process so most senders will only do this as a last resort. We’ve found that a better solution is a hybrid approach that includes both engagement and confirmation elements.

Engagement-based list cleanup

One fact we know about spam traps is that they don’t open email (with very few exceptions). As such, excluding recent openers and clickers from your confirmation efforts will help minimize potential losses to your list. Once you’ve identified those recipients who haven’t engaged in the past 6-12 months, you can temporarily suppress them from further mailings, then send them a confirmation request. Those who engage with the confirmation request can be returned to your active mailing list, and the rest should remain suppressed.

Effectiveness grade: A

It’s nearly impossible to isolate and remove spam traps from your database, so it’s best to stop them from getting there in the first place. Getting clear permission for all new recipients and using an engagement-based list hygiene process can all but eliminate the risk of spam traps in your list and make sure you never need to put these methods to the test.